I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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Facebook, Twitter? Can The Decline of Social Media Come Fast Enough?

SAN FRANCISCO - NOVEMBER 15: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a special event announcing a new Facebook email messaging system at the St. Regis Hotel on November 15, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Facebook will launch a new messaging system aimed at enhancing it's social media product to its 500 million users. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

A year or so back I wrote about giving up my smartphone. Today I read in the Washington Post about former Facebook employee Katherine Losse who left disillusioned with the business of social media, and no doubt now observes Facebook‘s struggle with the mobile generation with some satisfaction. On the back of that I want to offer a perspective on social media as a danger. For me, Facebook and Twitter are declining aspects of my work and social life. I never became a Facebook fan and I used Twitter sparingly. Even this hands-off approach, though, now strikes me as too much. We need to talk about social media.

Let’s start with blogging. When blogging first started the writers who populated the genre were, by and large, people who had a lot to say but who were cut off from mainstream communications. They weren’t journalists or, if they were, then like me they would be freelance. For the freelancers among us blogging was suddenly a way around the editorial gates that constantly frustrated our careers. We could show we could write good stories and strong opinion, left to our own devices. It was a career lift.

Two things happened quickly, though. The first was an extraordinary pecking order that emerged in what was supposedly a more democratic genre. There were celebrity bloggers and then the rest. It seemed, right from its inception, that blogging created a new kind of force, a desire to follow and a willingness to let the genre be, in a sense, monarchical.

Then business stepped in. Companies like Federated Media swept up the star names and built businesses and marketing around them. Enterprises and newspapers also began to blog. Those who had not capitalized quickly on blogging faced a choice. Keep on going at zero income, try to get a business-blogging gig, or give up.

By about 2007 serious blogging was in decline, though it has since revived – at least in numbers. What had died though was the sense that blogging would change opinion in any substantial way. The blogger as minor revolutionary was gone.

No sooner had blogging begun to decline than social networking, Q&A sites like Quora, and microblogging began to pick up. Leading bloggers were quick to use these developments and to dominate or lead the pack here as they had in blogging.

It’s difficult to conceive of these media as channels of opinion but they have become channels to action, channels for organization, like in the Arab Spring and in disaster zones. They are powerful but they are not opinion forming. If anything they amplify the tendency of blogging and all social media to create new elites or new monarchs or new tribal leaders.

There has a been a compulsiveness about these new media too, a need to acquire those followers and friends and to dominate these spaces, that seems unhealthy. That compulsiveness extends to ordinary users some of whom seem incapable of acknowledging the world around them as they burrow down into their smartphones. Social media is being recognized as a potential addiction. And that’s why I gave my smartphone up. When I found myself using it in bed.

And of course the corporate world has moved in here too. The act of opinion-based communications is compromised by too much enterprise presence. If you’re a newspaper writer, a TV producer, an viewer or reader then you will at times have gone in search of media experiences that are not bought up and packaged for corporate use. You know that corporate use is important in some spheres of life but nevertheless you need space where an advert is not subliminally or nakedly in your face. It feels like we’re being hunted down.

There is another issue that writers confront and more and more readers are commenting on it. To be read you now have to think about search engine optimization, what will tweet well, whether you can inject an outrageoues headline, or what type of community (reddit, Stumbleupon, Linkedin) is likely to amplify that headline and give you the readers you need. In effect, you constantly risk becoming a part of, and only adding, to the noise. See this excellent piece here for other dangers.

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It means you are calling for or predicting the collapse of various social media, yet are publicly advertising that you use almost all forms of it. Why don’t you get rid of your social media connections? If you don’t, it seems to me that your article is meaningless, or you are a hypocrite.

I did. I know you’re mainly referring to your last paragraph. But, the decline of social media can’t come fast enough if you continue to use it. Also, if you are a big beneficiary of it, why would you want it to go away? You sound like elderly people 20 years ago calling for the demise of or questioning the efficacy of e-mail.

I think it means it just seems rather ironic that you are complaining about your dislike of social media, and yet the article has buttons so the reader can add it to just about every social media site there is.